Marketing Automation: 3 Ways to Measure ROI

Marketers everywhere are finally realizing just how necessary marketing automation technologies are for their campaigns. In fact, SiriusDecisions notes that marketing automation adoption is expected to increase 50 percent by 2015. Clearly, this isn't just a buzzword (it never was). Rather, it's a valuable tool for optimizing your sales cycle. And while marketers are certainly recognizing the value provided, as is the case with anything new, they're still seeking clarity on how to best measure its return on investment.

Below I outline three of the many ways marketing departments can measure ROI for their marketing automation programs. While there are always other areas to analyze and achieve business value, these are good places to begin:

Lead scoring: Automation takes the guess work out of passing qualified leads to sales. According to Mac McIntosh of AcquireB2B, sales teams now accept and process more than 58 percent of marketing-qualified leads. Because these leads are of a higher quality, they can yield an increased close rate of more than 23 percent. McIntosh highlights that an "organization can expect to close roughly five deals per program based on a 50,000-name database. That's a revenue increase of about $400,000."

A 2011MarketingSherpa study found that companies using lead scoring see a ROI of 138 percent, while those not using it see around 78 percent return. The more accurate marketers make their scoring models, the better results they'll see. Incorporating customer and prospect behaviors via marketing automation improves the accuracy, resulting in a higher quality of leads going to sales. When behavioral "facts" are embedded in scoring models, in addition to demographics and firmagraphics, sales will be more confident about the leads they're receiving from marketing, ultimately resulting in more closed deals.

Nurture programs: Theseprograms enable marketers to strategically educate prospects who aren't yet ready to engage in a sales cycle. Gently guiding them to a purchase decision can produce two times the open rates and three times the clickthrough rates of one-off emails.